The Bolsheviks would beg to differ on whether the kulaks were an elite class.

When LLMs reproduce someone else's work, it is theft and appropriation, and our tech culture is rationalizing it out of hatred of the laptop class -- the kulaks, in my analogy. These traditional media do have their faults, and it's fine to point those out. But reporting is work, consisting of more than just "copying and transforming", and stealing it is wrong. "[F]orcing" it into the public domain is no more a "best outcome" than forcing the farms to collectivize.